Both architects and both buildings attempt to transcend the constraints of “style,” and in that both support Adolf Loos’s famous dictum of a house on the outside being dumb to protect its inhabitants. Neutra certainly loathed any association with the “International Style,” complaining that if any tradition deserved the label it was the Classicism of Greece and Rome … and Schindler’s manifesto of 1913 declares that “the modern dwelling should not express style or personality; it should provide a quiet environment for the occupant.” Yet while they both attempt to transcend style, the two houses were the exact style “Doctor Lovell” ordered to embody the height of fashion.

There are any number of ways to analyse these two houses. One way, obviously, is tectonically and spatially. Another is the unique convergence of European and American ideas about health, manifest in these houses that are “bodies” for healing human bodies. Eachhouse was fit to a purpose, just as the body is fit for a purpose: Both houses resolved competing agendas; both represent the visage, the affect [stet], the face of, Philip Lovell. Shelter from the storm no longer the only duty of architecture.

But what are some other factors?

the role of European sanitoria whose design anticipated modern architecture with insistence of the role of Licht und Luft .. beds that could move out into the sunshine, flat roofs – snow loads and rooftop terraces; the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918.

the German embrace of Nature as ameliorative, a very romantic view, seen in the poetry of Goethe and Schiller, music – Beethoven’s 6th, the Pastoral. European background: Wanderlust, the culture of sanitoria , the cult of nature, romance – flat roof. Germania: “Die Seele wird vom Pflastertreten krumm” (“treading the pavement distends the soul,” as poet Eric Kaestner observed.) Only a return to Nature can make you whole. Goethe’s romantic and rather Shintoesque takes that God was present in all things natural.

the parallel development of quantitative psychology, seen in Goethe’s writings on science and Wundt’s 1874 Principals of Physiological Psychology. From Europe, then, the idea is the continent’s failure to control disease. By contrast, where could one control health?

California’s role as being a perfect petri dish integrating some quantifiable and some quack ideas about nature. For example, in Vienna, you had to go through several transitional spatial stages to get to actually warm rooms. Often these stages required keys, heavy in your pocket. My parents lived there for eight years, and I know the heavy ring of keys from personal experience. In California, you could dispense with these stages, and often the myriad of heavy keys, and build with the thinnest of membranes—glass—or no membrane at all.

The role of a house as the face, the visage, the soul, the mind, of its owner … and no one wanted to be more perceived as a radical Modernist than Morris Saperstein, who was as Horatio Alger as they get, starting life out as a Jewish insurance broker in Hoboken and ending up as the distinguished, wealthy, Dr. Philip M. Lovell, with no less than Harry Chandler as his patron. Just as important as Chandler’s wealth, the publisher had suffered from tuberculosis, a disease that had the notorious title “Captain of the Men of Death.” Thus, one could argue that Chandler was particularly amenable to “Dr. Lovell’s” recommendations and approach to healthy living: healthy living could cure cancer and epilepsy, let alone common colds and weight issues. Lovell was the worst kind of quack in that his knowledge was half sound, half unfounded, for example, masturbation and homosexuality e.g. led to insanity. All sorts of new machines for soothing the nerves, ultraviolet light, etc.

The late great architectural historian David Gebhard: “Through his column, ‘Care of the Body,’ and his Dr. Philip M. Lovell Physical Culture Center (on 12th Street, 1927), Lovell had an influence that went far beyond the body. He was, and he wished to be considered, progressive, whether in physical culture, permissive Dewey education, or architecture.“

INTERTWINED AGENDAS of architectsand client

All three (2 architects, 1 client) are immigrants and outsiders

Like the newly emerging Hollywood stars of the twenties, much of Saperstein/Lovell’s big life was public. His home life, or at least the image of it, broadcast his message as much as his writings and professional life: his house therefore had to be an expression of how he wished himself to be seen.

House as Persona in HistoryIn 16th century Venice, a house façade married individual prestige to the degree of an owner’s artistic discernment (seen in the owner’s choice of artist),[1] just as his beach and city’s houses portray Lovell and Southern California’s prominence. Wealthy owners of houses commanding prominent sites along the canals chose between ornate marble (more costly and potentially too daringly sumptuous for civic decorum) and figurative frescoes done in brilliant colours of paint that in turn would be reflected in the water of the canal (apparently more modest because of its lower cost, but also flashier and “more socially aggressive.”) Both treatments required a delicate balance in how one faced the city; in the case of a painted domestic façade, it also relied on Renaissance art theory: since the house was a work of art, its design ought to be based on the study of nature per Alberti and Serlio, as historian Monika Schmitter has pointed out. “It is in this sense that the house is a portrait, a built body that imitates the natural body.” [emphasis added]. Thus, it was extremely important that the built body accurately represent the owner. So in the case of one up-and-coming merchant, images of abundance—grapes and grains, Bacchus flanked by Apollo and Minerva—not only depict the owner as a prosperous “sophisticated bon vivant,” but the flourishing city of Venice as well, she observes.[2]

An Essential DifferenceWhile Saperstein/Lovell and Neutra had equally compelling agendas for their version of Modernism — architecture as a tool for demonstrating the self, for S/L – whereas Neutra’s agenda was to demonstrate how prefabrication and commercial technologies could propel good health, it seems to me that Schindler’s agenda was architecture itself, that for all its Modernity, it was fully steeped in architectural history and tradition.

Both use staircases to great effect, Schindler’s akin to a grand Baroque processional but very modern in their frank expression of the narrative of function, one function ceremonial and formal, the other pragmatic and for fast access. While Schindler’s stairs, responding to a very limited site, are closely held against the torso of the house, Neutra’s much larger site allows him to orient the stairs perpendicular to the house. Schindler’s fireplace is outdoors, romantic; Neutra’s are indoors and are not expressed on the exterior. Schindler’s house is far more methodical, rhythmic, and balanced, while Neutra’s upper floor is a rabbit warren of wandering spaces, while the famous ground floor is the opposite in flowing interconnected space and sophisticated transitions.

Because we no longer need to be afraid of the elements, housed in a “timid shelter” whose décor evokes warmth and safety, architecture can assume “a more sublime and abstract nature.” This is a very material, physical building which asks us to transcend the material. The Beach House directly embodies Schindler’s 1913 manifesto in which he states, “Modern man no longer pays attention to construction,” yet of course, the way he designed the construction allows this very freedom from attention.

Schindler wrote, “The structural equations required by municipal code officials make the formal guarantee of stability superfluous. Construction has lost its interest.” Chilling thought. In any case, that frees architecture to be concerned with more intellectual problems that are simultaneously more sensual, more devoted to the subtle workings of our cognitive senses, of rhythm, proportion, balance.

Both believed in engaging Nature, one more as a science to be studied, the other to experience its romance. It was the privilege of the civilized man to no longer fear of the elements but coexist with them. Both trace the need for a contemporary architecture based on its ability to evoke a specific sentiment or frame of mind. A haptic architecture, related to the senses. As Harry Francis Mallgrave says, “the comfort of the dwelling no longer resides in its formal development but in the possibility of controlling within its confines light, air and temperature.”

In contrast to Neutra, Schindler did and tellingly attend Otto Wagner’s master class in the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts; Neutra attended Austria’s version of the Technical University; both attended Loos’s private seminars and informal teaching at a table at the Museum Café held Saturday evenings

Timeline

. 1920s Pauline Schindler assists Leah Lovell in day care under Barnsdall patronage.
. Schindler and Lovell discuss house in 1922, schematic design
. Lovell begins writing for the LA Times June 29, 1924, Lovell writes column called “Building Homes for Health.”
. Saperstein/Lovell’s patron, Harry Chandler, moved to LA for his health after almost dying from severe pneumonia from New Hampshire. LA Times became nation’s leading paper in advertising revenue for three straight years in the 1920s.
. 1924 Wright and Barnsdall part ways.
. 1924 Schindler designs the Lovell Mountain House in Wrightwood. Celotex – wood fibreboard, snow, soggy, collapsed.
. 1925 The Lovell Farmhouse, Fallbrook – burned down.

HOUSE FACTS / TECTONICS Similarities

They both have a lot of permeable membranes for immediate contact with the outdoors.

they both were programmed for four bedrooms (Schindler) and four discreet or merged sleeping porches

they both feature dramatic double height spaces and broad expanses of glass.

they both respond thoughtfully to eccentric sites.

both architects use the staircases to great effect.

both respond athletically to a virtually identical program.

Both individually underestimate the power of climate: Neutra’s master bedroom is located on the southwest with no overhang, Schindler overestimated even for Lovell the need to enclose the nude sleeping porches on the north.

Colors

Both complex structurally

Both are lifted into space, both are discussions of solid and void.

DifferencesOne is surface, skin, cladding, light-weight, more finely finished, tight tolerances; as Wright said, trying to be rude, “cheap and thin,” more elaborate, more agitated, exaggerated in its asymmetry.

One is monolithic, earthy, solid, evenly balanced except for the Baroque flourish of the stairs. Reinforced concrete with steel only used in tension to pull the concrete frames together. Schindler wouldn’t permit steel windows. Massive, immovable, like the pyramids. While Neutra’s balconies are suspended, Schindler’s project like his chin.

Neutra’s module is commercially based: three steel casement windows ganged together, around 5 feet. Schindler based his module on 48”, a paradigm of American wood construction.

STAIRS
Schindler’s majestic center staircase rises to the main floor, while in Neutra’s building in which one crosses a moat and goes down to reach the piano nobile, a upturning the Classical paradigm. Neutra does force the processor, the person, to turn 180 degrees twice but those turns are internal and relatively languid, he has the room on the site to do so. In the Beach House they are external, far more physical, far more body-like, relating to the tight site by being drawn up into the torso of the house. This type of stair, immediately adjacent and parallel to the body of the house, has a long tradition in architectural history – Schinkel’s Charlottenhof, Gardener’s Cottage, Potsdam, 1829. Schinkel was one of Mies’s chosen influences; Mies used a parallel stair at the 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, of course three years after the Beach House.

Regional response – house lifted on stilts like those around it, substituting concrete piles for wood piles.

Item of Note: Parapet walls project beyond sash to protect from water intrusion, something like Mies van der Rohe’s technique on the Turgendhat House completed four years later. Schindler’s move eliminated the sills.

[1] Monika Schmitter, “Odoni’s Façade: The House as Portrait in Renaissance Venice,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 66, No. 3, September 2007, 400. Ms. Schmitter includes the quote that was a summary of Morosini’s treatise by Margaret L. King in Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 148. Notably, according to Venetian mythology, the city’s early settlers fixed by law that all houses should be “equal, alike, of similar size and ornamentation.” Footnote p. 312, No. 61. Obviously, this democratic sensibility changed.

This Samoan tattoo technique, the full body pe’a, is what Loos was referring to when he condemned Viennese hypocrisy. This brilliant photograph is the work of famed National Geographic Society Fellow, documentary photographer Chris Rainier.

]]>https://barbaralamprecht.com/2018/06/24/why-its-ok-to-like-ornament-or-why-ornament-matters/feed/0barbaralamprechtThis Samoan tattoo technique, the full body pe'a, is what Loos was referring to when he condemned Viennese hypocrisy. Ionic Perspectives: Neutra’s VDL Studio, a Dwell Videohttps://barbaralamprecht.com/2017/01/17/ionic-perspectives-neutras-vdl-studio-a-dwell-video/
https://barbaralamprecht.com/2017/01/17/ionic-perspectives-neutras-vdl-studio-a-dwell-video/#respondTue, 17 Jan 2017 22:04:27 +0000http://barbaralamprecht.com/?p=967Ionic Perspectives: Neutra’s VDL Studio, a Dwell Video
]]>https://barbaralamprecht.com/2017/01/17/ionic-perspectives-neutras-vdl-studio-a-dwell-video/feed/0barbaralamprechtLOST: RICHARD NEUTRA’S MID-CENTURY MODERN FENESTRATION by John Blantonhttps://barbaralamprecht.com/2016/06/11/lost-richard-neutras-mid-century-modern-fenestration-by-john-blanton/
https://barbaralamprecht.com/2016/06/11/lost-richard-neutras-mid-century-modern-fenestration-by-john-blanton/#respondSat, 11 Jun 2016 22:52:46 +0000http://barbaralamprecht.com/?p=914Continue reading →]]>Born January 1, 1928 and raised in Houston, John Arthur Blanton graduated from Rice University, earning a B.A. in 1948 and a B.S. in architecture in 1949. He worked his way up in Richard Neutra’s practice from apprentice to “collaborator,” becoming one of the master’s trusted lead project architects in the so-called “Golden Era” of Neutra’s residential architecture. Beginning on his birthday in 1950, Blanton worked on preliminary designs for Neutra before serving in the U.S. Army from 1951 to 1952. He returned to the Silverlake studio in 1953, remaining until mid-1964, when he established his own practice. His distinguished career includes local and national awards for his work and inclusion in many local and international publications including Les Krantz’s “American Architects” of notable practitioners and Bruno Zevi’s ‘L’architettura.” As an architectural writer, Blanton wrote book reviews to the “AIA Journal” and wrote critiques for the Society of Architectural Historians, Southern California, and for his newspaper column, “Better Buildings.” Listed in “Who’s Who in America” and “Who’s Who in the World,” he retired in 2012. Blanton’s plans and drawings are being prepared for the archives, UCLA Special Collections. He shared his observations on Neutra’s approach to one facet of fenestration here. [Editor’s note: John Blanton died on December 15, 2018, in Merced, California after a long illness. He was so giving to those of us who needed his take on details, and his pungent observations on architecture, Neutra, and life. We mourn his loss, a kind person who seemed ageless with his innovative and invariably fresh thinking. Rest in Peace, honored friend.]

Among the great collective contributions of the non-traditional movements in architecture within the last two centuries is the “freedom of fenestration.” For example, no longer are architects limited to variations on the spacing of double-hung windows. And this new freedom has led to enormous opportunities for extra delights.

Just as new musical styles are associated with a generation, as bebop in the ‘40s led to jazz in the ‘50s, new architectural styles rise to the top every 20 years or so. And while it is true that many ideas and expressions are happening at any one time, one can still recognize a general pattern of agreement. After 1945, when war-time building restrictions ended, mid-century Modernism ignited the imaginations of architects for two decades. Laymen then lost Interest until its revival beginning in the mid 1980s. In the interim, the useful purposes of the original establishment of the style were forgotten or distorted. That is how a whole lot of history is lost.

Not everything! The studies in neuroscience in architecture will continue to show the benefits of bright, daylight rooms and probably many other aspects of work of the 1950s, when individual windows “punched” into a wall became a no-no.

In light of the changes that followed, I believe a review of Richard Neutra’s fenestration is justified. While ideas changed around him, he remained faithful to his original objectives. He maintained a purposeful approach as others around him began to toy with formalism, which essentially means knowing the ‘correct’ answer before knowing all the questions. Their iconic imagery would replace the organic concept of “Form Follows Function.”

Lowering costs through simplicity was always a factor for him so that the client could afford gracious social areas within a limited budget, which he took very seriously. This can be seen in rooms with a single exposure and in how he provided natural light to low, flat-ceilinged rooms (eight feet was standard at the time) without supplementary clerestories or skylights. After all, those supplements involved awkward window washing, maintenance of flashing to avoid leaks, and room-darkening devices.

A room with a single exposure, especially a bedroom or business office, is the hardest to work with. Neutra’s answer was wall-to-wall windows, but not necessarily floor-to-ceiling. Extending them to the corners created light onto, and gained reflection from, the side walls. This accomplishes brightness with lessening of glare. Some light from those walls reflects back onto the solid portion of the window wall, again decreasing glare. Thus, a feeling of a dark cave wall with a single overly bright opening was avoided. The effect of opening up the room is further enhanced because the eye flows to the nature beyond the glass, unhampered by the enclosure of dead corners. I have long believed that glare is caused by the eye’s rapid re-focusing between light and dark. This is stressful, which is why it is uncomfortable. Together with similar adjacent rooms, these wall-to-wall windows produced a long ribbon window on the exterior.

The walls below Neutra’s continuous windows might have built-in cabinetry or in a color different than the white side walls, perhaps the favorite color of a child occupant. If white paint were to be used below the windows as on the side walls, that low band of paint would actually appear to look dirty because less light is being reflected there. However, because using a color could detract from the view outdoors, which was his invariable goal because it promised the most actual health benefit, he did this on an individual basis. Ideally, his choice for this lower band was his chocolate “Neutra Brown.” This particular brown, it seems to me, is a “magic color” in that the eye identifies it but does not attempt to focus on it, so its use is oddly comforting, as I have experienced.

Any post in this extended bank of windows was usually painted silver, another “magic” color. It created the least amount of contrast with the incoming light, and it almost made any post disappear to create openness. Again, expansiveness! Additionally, Neutra ensured that any vertical sliding door jamb would be hidden on the exterior side of a post or wall. Likewise, he concealed the horizontal head of such door so that it was hidden within or behind the roof framing. Again, openness, rather than a sliding door frame silhouetted within the structural frame, which would pose another obstruction to our view of the outdoors. It is an experience so subtle that it is not seen other than subliminally. All this gives us the “Neutra impact.” We do not look at his windows, we look through them.

In the next twenty-year cycle, the architects of the 1970s strove to make their projects not to look like the ‘50s, by then passe. That is what a next generation does. Thus, ribbon windows became a no-no. Separated windows punched into walls became a fashionable choice again. The result? Glare!

These and other trends seem to be conceits based on style, while the sensible reasons behind the “forbidden” motifs are forgotten. I suggest that we do not let the power of the desire for consensus suppress our better judgment. What say?

John Arthur Blanton AIA-E
June 10, 2016

feedback: MR7B7@webtv.net

]]>https://barbaralamprecht.com/2016/06/11/lost-richard-neutras-mid-century-modern-fenestration-by-john-blanton/feed/0barbaralamprechtJohn Blanton Head ShotVideo Lecture: The Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, ANFA – “How to Stretch Space: Neutra’s Extraordinary Roots in Science and Landscape”https://barbaralamprecht.com/2016/02/25/video-lecture-the-academy-of-neuroscience-for-architecture-anfa-how-to-stretch-space-neutras-extraordinary-roots-in-science-and-landscape/
https://barbaralamprecht.com/2016/02/25/video-lecture-the-academy-of-neuroscience-for-architecture-anfa-how-to-stretch-space-neutras-extraordinary-roots-in-science-and-landscape/#respondThu, 25 Feb 2016 21:27:46 +0000http://barbaralamprecht.com/?p=908
]]>https://barbaralamprecht.com/2016/02/25/video-lecture-the-academy-of-neuroscience-for-architecture-anfa-how-to-stretch-space-neutras-extraordinary-roots-in-science-and-landscape/feed/0barbaralamprecht“Close-Together Houses Spur Lots of Gripes” – but they shouldn’thttps://barbaralamprecht.com/2015/12/26/close-together-houses-spur-lots-of-gripes-but-they-shouldnt/
https://barbaralamprecht.com/2015/12/26/close-together-houses-spur-lots-of-gripes-but-they-shouldnt/#respondSat, 26 Dec 2015 22:59:22 +0000http://barbaralamprecht.com/?p=880Continue reading →]]>A recent article in The Wall Street Journal raised an issue most of us dance daily: navigating privacy amid the inevitability of neighbors, in this case the occupants of single-family houses in tract developments.[1] We all want both: the sanctuary of privacy with enough community to not feel vulnerable. In other words, how does one design for civitas?

As I read the article, I began to look for something I didn’t find: curiously, the piece turned out to be blind to the fact that this quest for equilibrium is a classic architectural problem, one passionately discussed and endlessly investigated as a delicious challenge. What could have been a discussion on what architectural strategies actually work on behalf of privacy was actually a one-note issue, embodied by its title. “Close-Together Houses Spur Lots of Gripes” focuses on lot sizes and setbacks (how far a property is “set back” from the property’s front, rear, or side property lines) between houses. While front setbacks for such houses are usually fairly deep, say 25 feet or whatever is prevailing along a given street, side setbacks are typically where the action is in terms of potential conflict. “With just 20 feet” between one pair of houses, for example, one man complained that when he was working on his computer he could also enjoy a fine view of his neighbor’s dining room. Another homeowner was dismayed to discover that her neighbor’s second story window view included a view of her pool (and, of course, related activities around it.) A third homeowner described how awkward she felt when she was washing her dishes and saw and her neighbor was doing the same chore 17 feet away. Perhaps seeing another person doing the same mundane task reminds us of “Little Boxes” and how boringly similar we white Americans are in some ways … but more likely, if someone can see me washing dishes, what else can they see?

The article blames this suburban middle-class tension on two factors: the size of the house, and the size of the lot on which the house sits. It is true that the American home has increased 28% since the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the median size of houses was about 900 to 1,200, to today’s roughly 2,500 square feet. Meanwhile, the size of a lot has decreased 12% to about 8,750 square feet (about 1/5 of an acre.) But these changes are really just a red herring. Design, not distance, is the issue.

Not once does the article address the role of fenestration, or how it might have easily been changed to avoid gratuitous confrontation, however mild. No one wants to do the visual equivalent of “excuse me” all the time.

Why would the developer’s architect not have fun with such a fundamental issue? Locations of windows and doors could be nudged, diaphanous exterior screens employed, clerestories (windows well above head height) used, or skylights, among any number of creative solutions. At my house, I had all the lower sashes of the kitchen double-hung windows facing my neighbors’ rather cluttered side yard sandblasted so they are translucent, not transparent. They can see the top of my head, but not more interesting features below. In one key window, I placed a mirror in the upper sash, reflecting a large tree in my back yard rather than their refrigerator. When I designed a second floor for them, I made sure that their upper windows had no sightlines to my bedroom, although for them, the windows were perfectly placed to provide light where they needed it at a stair landing. In the rest of my house, “roman” blinds roll from the bottom up, giving me views of the San Gabriel Mountains; moving clouds and sky; and the Engelmann oak trees in my front yard (in contrast to the Coast Live Oak, the Engelmann’s diaphanous branching and ‘self-pruning’ ability adds an element of crisply efficient bio-functionalism in the face of wind loads, an evolved bit of smarts that makes their majestic dignity all the more amazing.) Collectively, all these views are important to us as animals who need to be alert to changes in our environment.

So many brilliant architects have already provided roadmaps balancing community and privacy. If one considers, for example, the 1920s and early ’30s European Siedlungen (government sponsored housing) developments in Germany and Austria by architects such as Adolf Loos, Walter Gropius, Ernst May, Mies van der Rohe, and Bruno Taut; Neave Brown’s Great Alexandra Road housing in Swiss Cottage, London, 1968 for the ambitious Greater London Council; Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1930s and early ’40s four-plexes centered around a courtyard (which inspired the founders of the famous postwar Crestwood Hills district, designed by A. Quincy Jones and Whitney Smith); or R.M. Schindler’s tightly knit Falk Apartments in Los Angeles, four flats fitted into a steep triangular site formed where two busy streets converge. Schindler’s daredevil geometries and clear facility with mentor Adolf Loos’s concept of Raumplan (in which varying room heights and sizes animate a space), not only fit on the site, which is an amazing accomplishment in its own right. Schindler also gave each resident unique views and richly textured, dynamic interior and exterior spaces. No cookie cutter here.

Also by Schindler, the 12-unit Pueblo Ribera, 1923, La Jolla, is a less custom development in that many of the units have identical footprints.

Its plan is an instant lesson in creating privacy: simply rotate the units around shared walls. One might also look at Richard Neutra’s Strathmore Apartments, 1937, or his Silverlake Colony of ten single-family houses overlooking the Silverlake Reservoir in northeast Los Angeles. Developed over two decades from the late 1940s to the early ‘60s, here Neutra tailored his architectural vocabulary to each client. Each house shares some features, finishes, and materials – weaving a clear identity to the group – but is also distinct, with individual views and its own specific relationship to the street, the reservoir, and the hills beyond. Each also alertly responds to the very intense human need for privacy. Neutra did not force community.

Irving Gill’s Lewis Courts, Sierra Madre, 1909, is one of the finest solutions to privacy and community I know.

Gill took a large square site, and basically drew two perpendicular lines on its plan, diving the site into four equal quadrants with major walkways assuming the role of the lines. He then placed a ribbon of very small connected houses along the site’s perimeter. The ribbon takes up about 1/3 of the parcel – try talking a developer into that today! Gill allotted the rest of the site to gardens, with a central public garden surrounding an roofed, open-walled gathering space. This principal Beaux-Arts layout gives way to secondary just-big-enough private gardens of varying shapes and more informal paths that lead to each unit, creating a hierarchy of desired involvement with others: ways to see and be seen. Gill gives you choices; in the language of environmental psychology, he set up a broad range of affordances in a disciplined way that acknowledges basic human traits. Likewise, the continuous ribbon of units is not static. While governed by Gill’s severely limited, gracious palette of simple shapes and surface finishes, nonetheless the little volumes variously step back and project. Heights change, too, along with window configurations.

Key to the composition is the site’s location, just below the San Gabriels. Tracking the rising slope, Gill introduced terraces that break a potentially static Beaux Arts parti in section, animating the Courts and providing a stronger identity to the units associated with each elevation.While the central space has been in-filled with some later additional houses, effectively destroying Gill’s vision (as well as undermining the spatial quality and serenity he delivered to the inhabitants with such generosity) the project remains a pretty damn flawless template for contemporary living, especially if you want to live in a small space as do so many baby-boomers and millenials.

To sum up, design, not distance, is the issue when solving “lots of gripes.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson Middle School in Westwood, Los Angeles, is significant as one of America’s leading examples of 1930s Modernism in the International Style. Funded during the height of the Great Depression by the Public Work Administration (PWA) under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and largely completed by the fall of 1937, the campus is a tour de force. Widely published, it was a watershed in school design that influenced many schools in America and beyond. It is one of the nation’s first comprehensive examples of the integration of early 20th century approaches to public education and early 20th century Modernist architecture. The campus, designed between 1936 and 1939 by Neutra with some later minor remodeling by the legacy firm Neutra and Alexander in 1955, masterfully demonstrates the integration of these objectives into a design that went far deeper than formal façade treatment. The school embodies a radical reinterpretation of a school campus at every scale, including the overall campus layout that served a complex hierarchy of newly defined relationships; the landscaping that weaves the campus together into a unified composition; the introduction of several new kinds of spaces devoted to new aspects of progressive pedagogy; and the classroom setting itself, including furniture, day and artificial lighting, wall treatments and clever storage. Originally named the Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School, the campus was referred to as a “school plant,” a widely used contemporary term that linked industrial factories to schools and the production of goods to graduating productive and educated citizens. The campus retains a high level of integrity.

In addition to its significance in pedagogical and architecture canons, the campus also reflects a response to new seismic requirements established immediately after the March 1933 Long Beach Earthquake, which destroyed 70 schools and damaged 120, most of them constructed of unreinforced brick-and-mortar masonry of multi-story freestanding buildings.

The educational theories to which the new school programmatically responded rest on the emerging idea of the child as an individual. This idea gained currency through the pioneering work of John Dewey (1859 – 1952), the American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer who authored Schools of To-morrow (1915) and Democracy and Education (1916) among many other works. These books advanced a more “modern” scientific and analytical treatment of educational theories; an acknowledgement of the inherent dignity of each child (in turn worthy of great design); the requisites of nature and experimental play as critical components of childhood; and the school itself as a “social settlement.”[1] “An article title “The School of Tomorrow” by psychologists Otis Caldwell and Stuart Frank published in 1924 elaborated on Dewey’s earlier work, anticipating a school that will

“pay far more attention to individuals than the schools of the past. Each child will be measured repeatedly from many angles, both as a basis of prescription for treatment and as a means of controlling development … all development of knowledge and skill will be individualized, and classroom practice and recitation as they exist today in conventional schools will largely disappear.”[2]

Many architects responded quickly to the emerging shifts in early and middle childhood pedagogical philosophy. According to the Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society, “after the turn of the twentieth century, when state legislatures passed laws restricting child labor and requiring education through eighth grade, public schools structured the encounter of most children with the public world. As the philosopher John Dewey made the case for child-centered education and businessmen demanded educated, skilled workers, social reformers pressed for modern buildings.”[3] Frank Lloyd Wright’s early Hillside Home School, Spring Green, Wisconsin, built 1887 – 1903, was initially a private school before it was integrated into Wright’s Taliesin studio. It embodied many of Dewey’s educational principles, such as several small, linked buildings of different sizes tailored to varying functions, copious amounts of daylight, and plenty of access to gardens and trees.[4]“

Several early Modern architects in Europe experimented with similar ideas, and the denser, older, often crowded urban conditions there led to an additional and urgent motivation: the constant threat of diseases, especially air or water borne diseases, that swept Europe and England periodically through the 19th century and especially after World War 1 when the deadly Spanish influenza killed many more millions of people than the war itself. “International congresses on school hygiene, the first of which was held in Nuremberg in 1904, exposed the mediocre ventilation and sanitary installations in school buildings, as well as the lack of any medical surveillance.”[5] England’s first open-air school, known as a “pavilion school,” was completed in 1907. Ernst May designed the Friedrich-Ebert Schule, 1930, in Frankfurt, Germany, with one story buildings for open-air classrooms. Each classroom opened to the outdoors (addressing health), and new types of group activity spaces were to promote the improvement of the students’ sense of initiative and autonomy (addressing individuation) as advocated by the New Education movement in Germany. Willem Dudok designed several schools in Hilversum, Netherlands in the 1920s in the same spirit of revolution and reinvention. The Impington Village college in Cambridgeshire, England, 1939, designed by Maxwell Fry and Gropius, incorporated these ideas in a middle school that also served the adult community after hours.[6] The Crow Island School in Winnetka, Illinois, designed by Eliel and Eero Saarinen and Lawrence Perkins of Perkins, Wheeler & Will in 1939, became as famous as Emerson. It shares much the same provenance as Neutra’s two completed schools, which both took design cues from his earlier theoretical design, the 1925 “Ring Plan School,” a one-story campus shaped as a circular series of classrooms surrounding an open playground.

The Crow Island campus includes self-contained group workspaces, flexible and light-filled interiors, sturdy materials of wood, brick, and stone, all on a rambling, one-story building footprint that extended out into the landscape. The project was considered so important that it garnered 13 pages in the August, 1941 issue of The Architectural Forum. It was the architects’ stated mission to create a “spirit of joy,” and be “warm, personal, intimate, inspiring and democratic, ” with classrooms – a far cry from the Victorian model decried by leading architect Joseph Hudnut, former dean of the schools of architecture for both Columbia and Harvard universities and responsible for bringing iconic Modernist architects Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Marcel Breuer to America. “We know what the first public schoolhouses were like: those dour, tightly balanced boxes of brick, proportioned according to the rules … we know how freedom and inquiry came gradually to supplant precept and enforced receptivity, and how an education of scientific method overcame the earlier mixture of ‘guess and tradition’,” he wrote in an introduction to the article on the Crow Island design.[7]

Neutra’s progressive design for Emerson was named, along with Wright’s Falling Water and Gropius’s house in Lincoln, Mass., as one of the leading examples of 1930s in American modernism in the classic historical survey, Art and Life in America.[8] However, his success was anticipated by his well-publicized addition to the Corona Avenue School, Bell, completed in 1935. Architectural historian Larry Speck named that small but idea-dense addition as “perhaps the most influential of the early modern school buildings,”[9] even though the new one-story L-shaped wing consisted of only two kindergarten spaces and five classrooms. The design shares many character-defining features Neutra used more elaborately for Emerson. For example, many ground-floor classrooms featured a sliding glass wall that opened to a patio and then to a grass lawn, bordered on each side by hedges and above by tree canopies; operable clerestory windows on the corridor wall to ensure balanced light and natural ventilation; movable furniture that could be moved easily indoors or outdoors. These innovations, highly unusual at the time, helped to create a setting intended for progressive learning and a more creative, stimulating atmosphere.

Neutra’s commissions for both Corona and Emerson were not easily won, according to a memoir by his widow Dione, which recalls the avid support of School Board members and noted educational reformers Nora Sterry[10] and Grete (Margarete) Clark. Both, she said, were attempting to operate beyond traditional school politics of getting things done and to eliminate corruption when they could. “There was a whole building boom in Los Angeles, and for every set of buildings that was built, schools had to be built too, so there were just a huge number of schools being built during those years … and his Corona Avenue school deviated from all the standards laid down by the Building Division of the Board of Education,” Dione Neutra said.[11] Mrs. Neutra’s remark about the building boom in schools was corroborated in a Los Angeles Times article. It reported that the school plant, conceived in September 1935, “is designed to meet the growing need for school accommodations in Westwood Hill. Within three months the enrollment increased to 710 students, by September 1936, the student body numbered 1,100, with a 350-student increase expected for 1937, thus indicating the growth of the residential district surrounding the school.”[12] Neutra designed a school for 1,450 students.

As well as his zeal for progressive design, Neutra’s acumen in construction costs structural engineering, and detailing served him well in convincing the school board he was the man for the more prominent Emerson commission. In a special section devoted to international school design of The Architectural Forum, January 1935, including schools in the U.S., Italy, the Soviet Union, among many others, Neutra received the lion’s share of the issue with his article, “New Elementary Schools of America: The Redesigning of the Basic Unit of Education—The Individual Classroom—As a Necessity;” with a second article covering every prospective construction cost per square foot for such a classroom, including alternatives for finishes as well as construction techniques; and a third article on his radical “Ring School” scheme (realized almost four decades later as the Richard J. Neutra Elementary School at the Lemoore Naval Air Base, Lemoore, California, built in 1961.)

Neutra was notified of the Emerson commission on January 7, 1936 by H.E. Griffin, Secretary, Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles, and L.L. Cunningham, Assistant Secretary.[13] The new buildings, oriented southwest on Selby Avenue on a 9.5 acre site, replaced temporary wood bungalows and tents that had served the students beginning in 1935. Neutra, with his employee, architect Peter Pfisterer, designed and provided extensive working drawings and detail sheets (199 drawings) for 12 buildings. The building was dedicated on Nov. 23, 1937, and the Dedication Program, beginning 7:15 pm that night, noted a total of 225 rooms, with classes and teachers listed for the principal buildings as well as those in “bungalows,” “shops,” and the “physical education building,” and included subjects such as math, music, metal shop, electricity, and printing.[14]

The large-scale strategies he implemented include breaking down the conventional monolithic school building into several low-rise structures. As the Los Angeles Times pointed out, it was to be “one of Los Angeles’s first schools of steel construction throughout,”(actually built as a combination steel-frame and reinforced concrete) intended to better resist earthquakes in accordance with the Field Act passed in April 1933.[15] Each building was designed for a specific purpose for different kinds of learning both academic and pragmatic. Five major one- and two-story buildings included the classroom building; the “new assembly hall,” known as the auditorium; the administration building; the cafeteria; and the “physical education building,” or the gym. Secondary, smaller buildings included three identical “bungalows,” two “pavilions,” a craft building and a shop building (separated acoustically from the rest of the campus on the northeast corner) and all are extant, though have been altered to various degrees and other buildings have been added. [ELABORATE WITH SPECIFICS] Playgrounds and yards were located at the opposite corners of the lot. Careful landscaping, plantings, and trees linked and reinforced spatial relationships and afforded interludes of sunlight and fresh air between indoor activities, and added to the sense of a unified composition. The overall asymmetry of the campus as a work of urban design, as well as the asymmetry of the principal buildings themselves, reflected another established tenet of the International Style in which bilateral symmetry was rejected as historicist and static.

In a description of Emerson, Neutra wrote,

“Large glass areas set in steel sash and provided with aluminium-coated Venetian blinds permit any desired degree of daylight illumination and patio doors from the social sciences room and the well-equipped art department open up to outdoor instructional areas intimately attached to the indoor classrooms. Several of these exterior doors are of sliding type, sixteen feet wide, so that the landscaped patio and the classroom are welded together into one useful area dedicated to a more space taking activity of all kinds.”[16]

Windows frames and doors were also painted with silver aluminum paint; the metallic paint was not only durable but intended to disperse light and blend in with the background. At Emerson, highly placed transom windows on corridor walls ensured the “democratic” distribution of daylight to each student as well as cross-ventilation, minimizing the threat of airborne diseases linked to crowded urban settings. The sliding walls led to patios sheltered by roof extensions, extending usable space even when raining. The patios opened to outdoor spaces of grass bordered by hedges.

Interiors were painted according to their relationship to the sun: “cool light blue green for all rooms with ample sun radiation” and “warm light yellow where the light is diffuse.” Floors were laid with “standard brown battleship [meaning thick, once used in military settings such as ships] linoleum.”

Neutra himself enumerated some of the character-defining features present today as well as his innovations:

Abundant fenestration to allow for uniformity in distribution of light in the classrooms a well as lobbies and corridors, controlled by venetian blinds which have been installed throughout the entire building as well as corridor entrances and stairways.

Commodious classrooms to allow for freedom of activity on the part of pupils in planning and executing projects.

Sliding classroom walls and door opening from the ground floor class rooms to permit of pupil activity in patios adjacent to the classrooms. These devices double the working area ordinarily available to class work, at the same time allow for supervision by the classroom teacher.

The library and textbooks rooms have been located on the same floor in adjoining rooms, to allow for general supervision of both … by the librarian and her staff. This arrangement allows for a constant flow of reading and illustrative materials to the various classrooms’ supplementary shelves, [which have been] installed as permanent equipment. This makes possible a decentralization of library services and a more intensive use of needed books by a larger number of pupils.

The traditional blackboards have been replaced in large part by cork boards, allowing for frequent and more general posting of illustrative materials and pupil.

Electrical outlets have been installed in classroom walls offering facilities for the use of radio and motion pictures both of which play important part in instruction.

The main corridor on the lower floor of the building has been staggered at the entrance lobby to allow for greater freedom of movement on the part of large numbers of pupils; at the same time giving interest and character to floor design otherwise conventional and institutional in effect.

The stairways, divided to control traffic, are well lighted with tall windows reaching to the top of the second floor ceiling offering inviting passage between floors.

The library, though located on one side of the upper floor, is lighted from two sides, the corridor side having access to light through a tier of transom windows above the roof level of the adjoining corridor.

The second floor also offers a number of rooms for conference purposes, smaller in dimension than regular classrooms, with lower ceilings. [Thus inflecting these rooms with different spatial characteristics and a feeling of intimacy.]

Rest rooms for teachers of both genders providing adequate accommodation for relaxation.

Supporting pupil work rooms adjoining classrooms for storage for supplies, provide space for activity involving use of specialized materials.

Art rooms form a T and receive northern lighting. Its roof is surfaced with a grilled flooring so that groups of pupils may assemble thereon for various types of class activity.

Many of the class rooms are equipped with movable tables and chairs, offering flexibility in arrangement and freedom in adjusting to many of the informal practices prevalent in the class room procedure.

15. Artificial lighting fixtures in the corridors are recessed to conform to the simplicity of the line which characterizes both the interior and exterior of the building.

The landscaping surrounding the buildings calls for plantings of trees and hedges bordering the classrooms, designed to lend not only utility but beauty as well to the immediate school environment.[17]

Neutra concluded his list by noting especially interesting spaces, such as “the oral English and recitation room with a novel diagonal arrangement of stage and setting” and “a textbook room of a new stretching layout and low ceiling … A physical education unit with bathing facilities in the ground floor and exercise and relaxation rooms in the upper story follows closely the latest standards developed from recent experiences in the Los Angeles High School District. A fundamental thought in designing this progressive school plant was to divert the available funds to the fulfilment of educational needs. It is a building created as far as possible for the benefit of the significant activity of the educator and of the children form which the next coming generation will recruit itself.”

Light and fresh air were considered especially critical to Emerson’s success. Neutra wrote, ““We might still lack the power to control at large the lightless home environment of the children of slum dwellers, but if we earnestly attempt it, we may surround them with healthy purity and a higher order of aesthetic appeal when we call them to school.”

In a more informal, unpublished essay, “A Junior High School – Practical and Aesthetical Problems” with a pencilled date of November 17, 1938, Neutra recounted the year of building:

“I consider the year-long building activities an education in itself, with teachers adding comments based on their earlier stays in temporary bungalows, children participating and watching and asking questions, becoming ‘owners.’ The noise of the steam shovels, the concrete mixers and riveting machines could not be silenced, but they became a stimulus to arrange a whole year’s experience and training around this vital event of building, of building a school plant, ‘our’ school plant.

“So many problems were introduced, so many questions brought up and dealt with, while the skeleton of the new school plant grew higher from week to week, while steel sash and glass were carefully unloaded from trucks, asphaltic roofing was laid, rows of shower stalls and shining plumbing fixtures were installed, and while grave inspectors were seen discussing matters with foremen and contractors. For the students and their parents the entire project grew into an ideal vast unit of experience with almost universal implications.

Teaching in a purely academic way may be disturbed by noisy life, but modern education has neighborly relations to life, sees in well-organized, real work around the classroom a most valuable object lesson which leads to inquiry, observations, discussions, training of critical faculties.”[18]

School officials and especially the Emerson faculty were pleased. Paul E. Gustafson, principal at the time, wrote on November 23, 1937 in a typed press release, “The Emerson Junior High School has recently been completed and represents an outstanding example of an attempt to plan a school structure with modern educational purposes in mind. It was designed by Richard J. Neutra, an architect of international repute. It is evident that Mr. Neutra designed, definitely, a school building to meet educational needs. He has made an outstanding contribution in this direction and the ideas expressed in the Emerson Junior High School plant will undoubtedly be reflected in much of the development to take place in future school building planning throughout the United States.”[19] Gustafson also contributed a feature article on Emerson’s innovations to Architect and Engineer, published June 1940.[20]

Almost two decades later, another Emerson principal, Allen Campbell, wrote to Neutra on September 2, 1955 on the eve of the remodelling:

“Dear Mr. Neutra, I am delighted that you are the architect for the additions to Emerson Junior High School. I have returned, after 18 years, to be principal of the school, and before I forget I want you to know that the facilities which were built here for the convenience of junior high school children eighteen years ago are functioning most admirably today. In fact, many people are amazed when they learn he school is not a comparatively new one. We like the functioning aspects of the classroom buildings and the auditorium I consider is the nicest I have ever used, and this is my sixth junior high school in Los Angeles. I look forward to working with you in the months ahead. We are deeply grateful for your contribution to these excellent junior high school facilities in West Los Angeles.”

[2] Stephen Petrina, “Getting a Purchase on ‘The School of Tomorrow’ and its Constituent Commodities: Histories and Historiographies of Technologies,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 1 Spring 2002.

[4] Dewey was a Chicago contemporary and occasional advisor of Wright (see “Schools and Modern Architecture,” by Larry Speck, Architype,January 13, 2011, http://architypereview.com/15-schools/editorials/4-schools-and-modern-architecture, retrieved Oct. 30, 2011. Dewey also founded The New School in New York with others including radical historian Charles Beard, one of Richard Neutra’s closest friends and father of William Beard, who commissioned a house from Wright in 1935 in Altadena, California.

[10] Nora Sterry, a graduate of USC with a master’s degree in sociology focused on the Chinese population in Los Angeles, served on the Los Angeles School Board from 1934 to 1941. Formerly the principal of the Macy Street School, the Nora Sterry Elementary School in Los Angeles bears her name. Sterry also had strong connections to the League of Women Voters.

Context: A symposium held by the Historical Society of Southern California at the Autry Museum, Saturday 2 April 2010 on Los Angeles 1919 to 1945, addressed art, photography, music, literary culture, and architecture. One speaker was invited to address each arena. I contributed the presentation on architecture, and am posting it here.

We’ve been asked to consider the span between the twentieth century’s two great wars. It was a vital crucible for architecture and urban design in Southern California: the emerging hegemony of the automobile; an explosion in urban growth; the masterful and innovative handling of historical idioms in the work of Roland Coate, Myron Hunt, Wallace Neff, and Paul Williams. Once the nation’s most popular house style, the bungalow with its friendly porches beckoning the street gave way to the ranch with pools and backyard barbecues. Part of that mix, of course, was the introduction of Modern architecture via the Midwesterner Frank Lloyd Wright and the Viennese, Rudolf M. Schindler and Richard J. Neutra, who arrived in the 1920s. The two reign as Southern California’s iconic alpha and omega geniuses who worked for Wright and then worked together before they each established dramatically different trajectories for California Modernism, forever changing its landscape and inspiring generations of successors.

I am going to focus on one largely forgotten project Neutra designed in 1921. It is not a building type he is associated with. He designed this first independent project, a garden cemetery in a forest, long before he sailed from the port of Hamburg for New York in late 1923, leaving the “old, used-up continent,” as he called it. [2]

It may be a surprise to learn that Neutra’s first projects in Los Angeles of the mid- to late 1920s were not the skyscrapers he revered and worked on in Chicago. Neither were they experimental houses such as the Diatom series of prefabricated small dwellings, or the steel-framed Lovell Health House in Los Feliz, 1929, his calling card to international fame. Rather, his earliest projects were gardens, recalling the time after he completed his wartime service to Kaiser Wilhelm’s Imperial Army in 1918, when finding any architectural work was impossible during this economically exhausted period in Europe.

Suffering from malaria and possible tuberculosis, a gaunt Neutra recuperated at a small rest home in Switzerland[3. A friend recommended him to a well-known Zurich landscaping firm and nursery owned by Otto Froebel (1878 – 1966), son of the equally renowned garden designer Theodor Froebel (1810 – 1893.) Thus, Neutra’s first postwar job was not indoors in a drafting room but outdoors. “There, through the summer of 1919, he worked under the tutelage of the noted Gustav Ammann (1885 – 1955) and developed an interest in botany, horticulture, landscaping and site design that would serve him the rest of his life.”[4] Neutra planted, made topographical models, and was a general — if exceptionally talented — dogsbody to the Swiss Ammann, a peaceful Lutheran who took the ambitious Viennese Jew under his wing. They became life-long friends; Ammann even helped out with funds to aid Neutra’s trip to America.

The pacific Ammann is an unusual figure, embodying the shift from gardening in the nineteenth century, as a trade devoted to the husbandry of proscribed plots of land containing largely ornamental plantings, to a profession of landscape architecture, encompassing theoretical models and larger questions of land use. Ammann himself worked on hundreds of prestigious projects; in 1939 he designed the seminal Bad Allenmoos, setting a public bath in a park that is still well-used and much loved. He was active in emerging theoretical discussions with notables such as land economist Werner Hegemann; park designer Charles Eliot; the German landscape architect Leberecht Migge; and the American Charles Olmsted. All were reconceptualizing American, British, and European landscape design, especially the landscaped park, reconsidered in modern terms from that of picturesque to more unbounded open space or more functional outdoor room-like spaces.[5] It is noteworthy that Amman applauded the use of natural forms in a 1914 review in Die Gardenkunst of a new German park and using natural topography and plantings as the seeds for how a park develops, using existing contours for a gradual passage from one area to another and ensuring the sense of continuous space, an adage Neutra would practice and write about in his American work.[6] German landscape architects also embraced elements of Frederick Nietzsche’s belief that the body was the instrument through which the world was experienced and understood, a vein of the philosopher’s thought that promoted a more “natural” understanding of the body and nature. As did many other of his peers, Modernist architects, Neutra also embraced the ameliorative effects that expansive views of nature afforded. Charles Eliot, for example, “inherited the belief that the viewing of scenery provided positive psychological and therefore hygienic effects for urban dwellers.”[7]

Later in Germany, in Dahlem, near Berlin, Neutra designed at least three gardens for the commissions of his close friend Ernst Freud, the architect son of Sigmund Freud, ct Ernst Freud, Sigmund Freud’s son and a close friend; architect Erich Mendelsohn, and famed architect Arthur Korn; when Neutra arrived in Los Angeles in 1925, Schindler gave him the landscaping and gardens to design for the Barnsdall House (Hollyhock), 1921 (Neutra completed the landscaping later), the Howe House, 1925, and the Lovell Beach House in Newport Beach, 1926.

Neutra’s hardscape on the grounds of Barnsdall. Scan, Thomas S/ S. Hines, Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture.

Neutra came to Los Angeles because of its unexcelled topographical beauty. As he told the Los Angeles Times in 1933, “the people here are essentially an outdoor people, subconsciously stimulated by an intimate proximity to nature’s charms … and they are not tradition bound.” But even earlier, by the late 1920s, he was also warning about the psychological, physical, and economic effects of a decentralized city. He argued that successful architecture also had to address the increasing hostile conditions of urban toxicities, advocating a Los Angeles that could be simultaneously denser and with greater recourse to nature, the city, after all, where he wrote “Nature Near,” “Mystery and Realities of the Site,” “Senses and the Setting,” “Plant Water Stone Light,” all of them enlarging the radius of the project of architecture into Nature.

With that briefly outlined theoretical context, let us move on. The project in question is Neutra’s only cemetery, located 30 kilometers southwest of Berlin, that he designed as part of a master plan during his brief tenure, approximately eight months, as City Architect for the proud 12th century feudal town of Luckenwalde, with 26,000 inhabitants.[8] The 62-acre cemetery that Neutra called ‘his beautiful task” is called the Luckenwalde “Waldfriedhof,” literally a forested place of peace: wald, forest; fried, peace; hof, place. And when, as my title says it is forgotten, it should be the first project in the large canon of his work I wrote. You will not find it. When I stood in Waldfriedhof last summer, all my senses breathing in the serenity of this place, my oversight shocked me.

When I got home, I found plans and sketches in his archives, and lastly, an odd manuscript in dense German, its binding broken, about 6” x 14”, its edges black and charred, its condition betraying it as one of the few survivors of the fire that destroyed the Silverlake family home in 1963. This manuscript contains Neutra’s authoritative thesis, extensive research, a full documentation of every one of the 109 plants, trees, and flowers he used, and a meticulous budget that included future maintenance. Such careful documentation portended what he considered a major achievement, his orderly specifications for his buildings, in which nothing was left to chance.

For me, even given my college German, Neutra’s personality explodes off the brittle pages, bearing down on all fronts whether poetical or pragmatic, persuasive, cajoling, using any and all means to further his objective. Here you can clearly hear his voice in the text, stoutly arguing not only for a wooded, landscaped setting but, as he wrote, for the “right of even a farmer to share the same privilege as the first President of the United States, George Washington, who was buried at Mount Vernon overlooking the Potomac River,” thus reinforcing the ideal of a pastoral yet democratic pastoral setting fit for both president and farmer. Earlier garden cemetery precedents had a very “democratic” role: they quickly became the first public parks, meant for hoi polloi and not reserved for the private estates owned by the aristocracy. These early cemeteries were part memorial, part family playgrounds and picnic venues, all part of a larger response to the hostile aspects of the Industrial Age, dank overcrowded Victorian cities, illnesses compounded by unsanitary cities, and war-torn Europe. Neutra himself had considerable personal knowledge of such illnesses: his grandparents died in the 1850s from a typhoid epidemic; his father Samuel died in 1922 from the Spanish influenza that swept Europe and American in 1919, his older brother Siegfried died in 1946 of tuberculosis here in Los Angeles. Nature wasn’t just landscape, it was sunlight and fresh air.

The manuscript, however, betrays no trace of his exasperation with the city bureaucrats, a frustration that he shared in letters with his wife Dione, telling her that one councilman had said in a meeting that it was ludicrous for a city the size of Luckenwalde to have its own garden architect when Cologne didn’t even have one, that the cemetery was a donkey, that it was socialistic, too expensive – and the clergy, especially the catholic archbishop, were outraged and didn’t want competition for housing the dead.” To put that whirlwind of complaints into context, in Europe, graveyards were historically affiliated with churches and religions. If you were an Evangelical, you were laid to rest with Evangelicals; Catholic, with the Catholics. Luckenwalde Waldfriedhof, the city’s 3rd and much needed resting ground, the first after the Great War, and was expressly intended and championed by Neutra as something new, as a municipal, non-denominational cemetery, and not huddled around the skirts of a church but in a forest.

It is also the only work by Neutra that I could call expressionistic, and not at all Modern except in certain respects.

Plan, Waldfriedhof.

The plan’s principal element is the scarab beetle, the royal Egyptian symbol of the endless cycle of life and death, not exactly a Christian motif, driving home the point that the ritual of death applies to all societies across all time. The scarab was a familiar symbol in the Egyptian Revival, probably the most glamorous of the Victorian revival styles of the 1850s – 1890s, when Egyptian motifs and symbols were the rage after the Napoleonic campaigns at the end of the 18th century. The great archaeological digs culminated in opening King Tut’s tomb in 1922, just after Waldfriedhof’s architect completed his design and had left for glittering Berlin and work with the celebrated Modern expressionist, Erich Mendelsohn, and the cemetery was under construction; the discovery of the tomb precipitated a new wave of Egyptian Revival, happily employed in Art Deco and Hollywood Regency styles. Since Egyptian cosmologies were concerned with the divinities of nature, the scarab would perhaps be a logical inspiration. The beetle, for example, rolled a ball in front of it containing its eggs wrapped in dung, both dung and eggs the zenith of “natural.” But Neutra never before or ever again based a site plan on a symbol, let alone such a literal interpretation of one. For example, if you look at the zig-zag line, defining clearings, they are actually the scarab’s legs, while the two larger mirrored angled lines refer to the wings. And were you to see the original plan, you would be shocked at how literal the bug is.

However, Neutra manipulated this symbol in several ways. First, note the overall distribution of landscape areas, each different, and each a distinct space. There are many places to be buried, the plan seems to say: death is decentralized into many zones, all lovely. Historically the scarab as a symbol was restricted for royalty, never for hoi polloi. Here everyone is royal, egal, no one grave more important than another, yet another homage to democratic ideals.

While the entrance portal itself is bilaterally symmetrical, its location, at the corner of the cemetery, is not. This sets up the rest of the plan, asymmetrical, beginning with the long entrance path running along the edge of the property. Asymmetry was an expressly Modernist tenet of the International Style,[9] and paralleled progressive garden designs abandoning the formal, more axially symmetrical plans of traditional cemeteries in favor of a more subtle balance. Neutra animated this large, potentially static area with turns, clearings, terraces, gentle, small hills, subtle shifts in elevation, changes from dark protection to bright meadows, curves offsetting straight lines and responding to the need for solemn, public processions; open areas for fallen soldiers; and quiet private moments with the dead. In every way, the scale is beautifully modulated, a quality that I both saw and felt.

It is only through the black book, as I call it, that we understand Neutra’s method. Whereas I’ve always viewed him as the embodiment of the radical new theories of the 20th century, scientific as well as architectural, here he eagerly embraces 19th century precedents with no apologies. For example, he refers often to Spring Grove Cemetery in Ohio, designed by an “A. Strauch.” SLIDE SEVEN This is Adolf Strauch, 1822 to 1883, a Prussian landscape. Strauch had read the 23-volume book, Kosmos, written in 1849 by the globetrotter naturalist Alexander Humboldt. Humboldt described the strange natural beauty of Chinese grave gardens, which Strauch reinterpreted by ridding Spring Grove Cemetery of all the little railings marking off individual graves and extraneous detail in favor of a landscape that was complex but strong and cohesive. In this manuscript, Neutra carefully documents other garden cemeteries from New Orleans to Leipzig, noting their major attributes, all of which are Modern in reconceiving the cluttered graveyard as a garden cemetery whose ornament is nature. He talks about creating carpets, of bright lines of silver, of crocuses, copper beeches, irises, wild roses, groupings of conifers.

So let us go in.

One enters the city of the dead through the symmetrical gate with the hipped roof, quite Germanic and hardly Modern. The long procession begins with a straight path.

SLIDE NINE As we’ve seen in plan, we can make various turns, pass the soldiers graves,

or SLIDES TEN THROUGH THIRTEEN head to the nondenominational Chapel, unbuilt until 1937, not to his design, and I must say I’m relieved; Neutra’s proposal was a plain box with a long side-gable roof, curiously interrupted at the roof line with a series of projecting horizontal clerestories, a poorly resolved design that smacks of a determination to insert Modernism no matter what.

SLIDE FOURTEEN Considering the landscape – as distinguished from nature, a much larger concern – became a lifetime practice either by himself or in collaboration with clients or landscape architects including Garrett Eckbo, Ralph Stevens, Roberto Burle Marx, Jocelyn Domela and Gertrude Aronstein. Here you see [not posted on this website] the Tafel, the table of plants Neutra specified, including over 109 plants, trees, ground cover and shrubs. He specified some of these plants, such as the hardy juniper, for the rest of his life.

In an unsigned typed letter dated May 1970, right after Neutra’s death, the eulogizer wrote: “Here starts a new architecture that tried to understand the plant and the natural setting … man turned his back to nature and through the perfection of his technique, he moved away from it.” Neutra never did.

I’ll close my talk with this last image: Pails and rakes, for anyone’s use to care for the land and a loved one: communal tools for a democratic everyman.

[TO DO: COMPARE/CONTRAST AALTO’S CEMETERY]

[1] Formally titled the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act, the bill was signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt on June 22, 1944.

[2] Unpublished letter to Richard’s future mother-in-law, Mrs Alfred Niedermann, Lilly, from Berlin, November 1920 (no day date). Part of a photocopied manuscript given to the author by Mrs. Richard Neutra.

[3] This was the home of Elsa Telekey. See Thomas S. Hines, “Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture,” p. 26.

I had always considered the Los Angeles County Hall of Records, 1962, to be a soldierly but stolid example of mid-century Modernism. Reconsidering it through a visit and looking at correspondence was a revelation. In fact, this building, primarily famous for the technical prowess of its striking 120-foot-tall, south-facing aluminum louvers, is really a lesson in designing for sustained productivity. When peppered by reporters’ questions about the louvers, co-lead architect Richard Neutra said, “All technical things are auxiliary to human well being and an aid to vitality. … The most important thing about the louvers is that responsible government officials have been convinced by Mr. Neutra’s biological approach to protect the 1,200 employees working inside from unfavorable physiological conditions. The physiology of the eye, of vision, the fatigue and irritations produced were discussed by Mr. Neutra in open political meetings and reported in all Los Angeles newspapers …”

The 15-storey structure was designed by a consortium of architects led by then-partners Neutra and Robert Alexander, a distinguished architect and urban designer, to house those banal but critical government functions such as regional planning, probation, and legal records. The T-shaped building is sited in a pivotal position helping to define the north edge of the city’s civic core. To the west lies the contemporary glitterati of Gehry’s Concert Hall and Moneo’s Cathedral; to the northeast is the older Art Deco + Beaux Arts-style City Hall. The big concrete-framed windowless stem of the T, pointing south and clad in white terra cotta, stores paper records, with floor plates at 8’-6” to maximize storage capacity, while offices, with a doubled plate of 17,’ occupy the steel-framed east-west stroke.

Although it’s a little rough around the edges, the Hall of Records is an intelligent workhorse, with prescient responses to the ergonomics of working and environmental and solar issues. Its finishes of granite, brown and white terra cotta tiles (vertically oriented to acknowledge their non-structural purpose), stainless steel, glass and aluminum, were chosen to endure hard and incessant use. (There is no stucco anywhere.) Rendered in various scales, weavings and panels, these elements often run into the interior to connect indoors to out. On the exterior, the effect is one of layers of subtly rich textures that articulate and soften the large volumes. The strategy speaks to a century of dialogue on cladding: Neutra studied with Adolf Loos, whose views on cladding were informed by 19th century German theorist Gottfried Semper. And then there are minor miracles, like the exquisite shaded outdoor terraces scattered throughout, a reflecting pool (now empty) near the lobby that “eliminated ground cover and serves the psychology of the entrance,” a mosaic wall sculpture by Joseph Young, (slated, with the pool, for restoration), and stainless steel light fixtures looking like a hybrid of Brancusi and Darth Vadar in what must have been a sleekly handsome cafeteria (now converted to office warrens) overlooking all the city. Not bad for a county office worker.

The architects layered functions as well. For example, the louvers, built by the same manufacturers who built the louvers at Neutra’s famed 1947 Desert (Kaufmann) House, were designed to do several things. They eliminated solar gain before sun hit the glass. (The architects presented a cost/benefit analysis showing a $113,650 savings over five compared to “air-conditioning and Venetian blinds.”) The hollow blades act as flues to encourage air flow outside the building envelope. Their sensual shape and silver coating diffuse light and provide ambient side lighting, reducing glare. (“Perpetually shaded and agreeably diffused, to the delight to human beings inside, whose comfort and efficiency, not impaired by fatigue and irritation, soon pays back for the millions of dollars investment in psychosomatic health,” Neutra wrote to the county.) Finally, the “verticalness” of the louvers saluted the legacy of the columns of a “dignified” classical building and drew on all those “emotional associations that go with wonderful tallness,” Neutra wrote.

The building is rife with such intelligence. Smaller fixed fins on the north side of the building “provided shade after 8 a.m. all year long.” Because the architects wanted to reduce the cumulative eye fatigue created by intense contrasts of light and dark, the architects argued against “punched-in” windows, noting that the eyes of our genetic ancestors were attuned to sudden contrasts as a survival mechanism, not exactly helpful in an office setting. Instead, armed with research from leading eye physiologists, they proposed “continuous fenestration carried to the ceiling, like the high windows in Georgian architecture or from trees, reducing contrast by reflecting ample light on light-colored ceilings and partitions … “

The 17’ plate height also permitted the architects to engage in some good Wrightian (or Loosian, your preference) games in section: offices suddenly change in height, so that employees could feel both protected near the core of the building and then enjoy a feeling of expansiveness near the windows.

As I walked through the building, it occurred to me that I was seeing several moves that I had seen in Neutra houses. That is because Neutra did not distinguish between the human at work and the human at home. Their cognitive, emotional and sensory systems were ancient. Buildings needed to respond organically, no matter whether the building was home or office, Georgian or Modern.

Orange Coast College’s original legacy campus, the world’s only college campus designed by the powerful trio of master architect Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander with master landscape architect Garrett Eckbo, Eckbo, Royston and Williams, is proposed to be demolished. Neutra and Alexander were assisted by noted Orange County architect William Blurock, FAIA, among others. Here are some historic materials to underscore the importance of this award-winning campus, now evaluated as a potential historic district. Source: UCLA, Charles E. Young Research Library, Special Collections, Collection 1179, Richard and Dion Neutra Papers.